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You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

A. S. Byatt

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A. S. Byatt
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: August 24
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Sheffield
England
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy
Antonia Susan Drabble
Antonia Susan Duffy
Feel
Childish
Must
Surprise
Feels
Writers
Children
Deep
World
Child
Feelings
Stills
Still
Truism

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I'm not very interested in myself. I do have a deep moral belief that you should always look out at other things and not be self-centred.
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I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.
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An odd phrase, by heart, he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream.
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In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
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I was no good at being a child.
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She was a logical child, as far as children go. She did not understand how such a nice, kind, good God as the one they preyed to, could condemn the whole earth for sinfulness and flood it, or condemn his only Son to a disgusting death on behalf of everyone. This death did not seem to have done much good.
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Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.
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I grew up with that completely fictive idea of motherhood, where the mother never strayed from the kitchen. All the women in my books are very afraid that if they do anything with their minds they won't be complete women. I don't think my daughters' generation has that feeling.
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…my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have.
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...it is not possible to create the opposite of what one has always known, simply because the opposite is believed to be desired. Human beings need what they already know, even horrors.
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Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.
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I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.
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I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.
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Young girls are sad. They like to be it makes them feel strong.
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History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself.
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…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew….
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I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.
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They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side... He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
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I think vestigially there's a synesthete in me but not like a real one who immediately knows what colour Wednesday is.
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Literary critics make natural detectives.
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